Idiot Ball/Tabletop Games

Villains and Vigilantes: A mid-1980s-vintage module for this Superhero Roleplaying game demanded the entire team pick up the Idiot Ball simultaneously in order not to disrupt its plot: during a bodyguarding assignment, the villains stage an incredibly obvious distraction—and the module itself insisted that any hero who does not immediately abandon the NPC they are guarding to respond to the obvious distraction is a bad hero and should be penalized by the GM. The remainder of the module's plot depended upon the abandoned NPC being kidnapped at that point -- but it provided no alternatives for how this could be accomplished if even one hero did not discard his brains on cue.